


Leave it to the wayside like you do

by clairvoie



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Hannibal is leaving for Cuba, Hannibal wants Will to come with him, Kind of a small character study if you can call it that., Molly is mentioned a few times, Non Graphic Suicide Attempt, One Shot, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Suicide Attempt, Will doesn't know if he will follow, Will is racked with the responsibility of decision, for now...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-02
Packaged: 2019-04-17 05:12:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14181513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clairvoie/pseuds/clairvoie
Summary: "Will looked up at him, and, feeling something warm sink inside his gut, thought 'damn him. Damn him to hell.'"





	Leave it to the wayside like you do

**Author's Note:**

> TW: I've written about a non-graphic suicide attempt on Will's part. It isn't the main focus, but it's there.

The taste of salt water lingered in the back of his throat like a stuck pill. He laid on the bed, still and quiet and cold, sheets rumpled up near the edge and covering only his toes. Everything hurt. The ceiling rocked back and forth like he laid in the middle of the sea. 

Initially, he had taken three tablets. And they had worked: the pain lessened to an ache, and the ache felt more like a buzzing after a while, and he had slept. 

His bandages had bled through into the sheets while he was out, their stickiness uncomfortably obvious as he grew more and more aware through the drugged grogginess he was experiencing. 

The curve of another body lay disposed beside him on the bed. Wrapped in bandage upon bandage, and naked safe for them and a pair of cotton underwear.

 

In the washroom of the cliff house, Will’s skin looked blue. Blue and white, and a red that seemed impossible to scrub away. He tried again, taking what was left of his broken nails to scrape at the discoloration, but it seemed to have taken a hold to his skin...this evidence of spilled blood. He looked vague, like a spectre, like the mirror couldn’t catch all of him in its reflection anymore. Shards of glass didn’t fall from his face, but empty space seemed to live in the whites of his eyes. 

His skin itched. His brain ached, like it had filled itself with lead overnight. Like the sea hadn’t just entered his trachea, but had seeped its way, slowly, into the cavity of his head. He was filled with remnants of his grave, and the sharpness of his birth ached throughout his limbs and bones and muscles, and never yielded.

 

When Hannibal would ask him about it later, he would say he had only been attempting to numb these things he felt, to cause the shrillness of the pain inside of him to yield finally, if only for an indefinite or finite time. And Hannibal would take his pulse again, and, kindly, would retreat back into the kitchen to fill his glass with warm water once more. And Will would know that he hadn’t been lying, nor had he been telling full truths, because he knew that that same pain, the ache of wounds and the glow of stained blood, was what his existence had come to present itself as. And that that existence, ultimately, was what he had been trying to put an end to when he had swallowed the whole bottle of oxycodone tablets with three fingers of whiskey. All the while as Hannibal slept in the bed Will had ruined with his no longer clotting blood. 

“Are you well enough to walk?” Hannibal asked, after placing the glass down by the bedside.

 

Will reached for it, straining his bruised shoulder. The second batch of honey and tea worked to soothe his throat as it had initially after he had vomited up the last of the pills. After Hannibal had finally removed his fingers from the back of Will’s throat.

 

“I think so. Why?” He asked, tentatively.

 

“There are lights on the distant road; new ones. Chiyoh has prepared the boat for sailing. We should leave, if we wish to make it out without Jack catching our trail.”

 

Will let his head fall heavy against the headboard of the bed, held a breath, then exhaled open-mouthed. “You tell me this like you expect me to follow,” he said, avoiding eye contact.

 

“I expect only that you have already decided, either way,” Hannibal replied evenly, before continuing, with his voice a tad quieter, “although the sentiment of hope would not entirely be misplaced.”

 

Will looked up at him, and, feeling something warm sink inside his gut, thought  _ damn him. Damn him to hell. _

 

“Where will you go?” He asked, avoiding answering the unsaid question posed to him. 

“Cuba, for now,” Hannibal replied. Then an odd look passed across his face, like something slipping off and simultaneously giving way to some hidden starkness he rarely let show. “Had you intended for our deaths, Will?” He asked.

 

It was a kindness. After all the word-play and volleying of meaning, this was a kindness: to get straight to the point, to say the things he knew Will would not be able to speak aloud to him. He both hated him for it and felt his mind fall to its knees in relief.

 

“I hoped,” Will began. “I had. .. flung the dice. I think, at that moment, it was easier to let the universe, or fate, or something else decide for me. Leave it to chance. Submit to some other violence not made from my own mind, or my hands… I didn’t want to think anymore.”

 

“Will you try to take your life again?” He asked, and, if Will wanted to entertain the idea, he might have said there was grief interlaced beneath Hannibal’s words.

 

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I have anything to take anymore.”

 

...

 

The call of distant police cars traveled down the winding road, only audible when Will had stood outside the dark house, furniture covered in sheets once more, the waves racking themselves against the bluff without end, and silence under the rock he stood on. 

Hannibal limped away from him, towards the pathway which led to a stocked boat, a bag of medicine, vials, syringes and 22 gauge needles slung across his shoulder. 

 

In the end, he had followed. Not from a sense of obligation, nor because he knew it was the right choice, but because any reality he could construct had a fair share of consequence and benefit and overwhelming uncertainty. 

His old-new life, his dogs, his country home, Molly… these things were familiar. He knew what they felt like, what they smelt like, what it meant to be a married man with a child and a house and planned purpose. He could remember the sensations of his wife beside him in bed, against his lips, in the soft spot of his neck when they embraced. He was certain they could reform their life as close to what it had been before the Tooth Fairy, the Red Dragon. 

Molly was a good woman: she would know how to gracefully place those memories underneath some thicker floorboards, and how to look at her husband as if he hadn’t been the one who indirectly placed her in a hospital bed. They both understood how malevolently kind the blindness of love could be. 

 

And then there was the earth. The raging sea would still wait for him, no matter how far away he went from it. He could always return, or use his gun, or take another two handfuls of opiates when he knew a certain someone wouldn’t wake up and stumble to the bathroom to find oxycodone for his own pain, only to find that there were no longer any. 

He could do these things, and he could re-try after he failed, and he could repeat and repeat and repeat, but he was no longer certain that the unknown of death attracted or repulsed him more than the unknown of never-ending becoming. Perhaps he could find out. And perhaps he already understood that he would never be able to go back to Molly, not in a way that would resemble the Will she was married to, for he had drowned in the sea hours ago. 

**Author's Note:**

> self care: channeling my suicidal thoughts into fanfic.  
> Come follow me on tumblr: @clairvoi3


End file.
